Parents are not assistant teachers!

David Mungoshi Shelling the Nuts

Similarly, the teacher should be that one person that the pupil can always depend on for tutored guidance and whose advice is not only proper, useful and relevant, but also expert and professional.

There is a rather worrying tendency among teachers in Zimbabwe these days, as they do strange things premised on baseless assumptions.

Take the issue of homework, for example. More often than not, primary school children are sent home with taxing homework and instructed to do it with their parents or someone at home.

This is a rather frightening development and calls for a serious paradigm shift and radical realignment of values.

Imagine a doctor sending a patient back home to be diagnosed by whoever is there.

To my knowledge, no survey has yet been carried out in this country to determine how far parents or guardians are capable of discharging the onerous pedagogical task of teaching/introducing new concepts across the curriculum, or consolidating them.

The poor shortchanged pupils are sent home with hardly a clue of what is expected of them, and the bewildered parents and sometimes the long-suffering grandparents too are equally bemused when new-fangled mathematical ideas are brought before their cowed eyes.

Most people who went to school before 1980 only know how to operate in base 10 and are mystified when a child has to work in another base.

Where you speak of tens and units you begin to speak of fives and units, for example. Sets and Venn diagrams are a mathematical and graphic maze for most.

When with your Arithmetic background, if you are an aged grandparent, you are imposed upon by a “tyrannical teacher to show a learner how to use Venn diagrams to calculate the common factors of certain numbers you find yourself in dire straits indeed.

When I first went to school centuries ago the teacher taught you things and gave you homework which you went home and did by yourself thereby developing a certain independence of thought and application.

Many parents and guardians were illiterate then but with a burning ambition to see their children educated. Teachers could never have abdicated their duty then.

The parents were providers who also gave moral support to their children. They did not have to double up as teachers, tutors or academic mentors, whichever way one wants to look at it.

Their contribution was a home environment conducive for productive extension work, plus of course a host of other things, materially speaking.

Thinking about this questionable, but fashionable new deed in education, I could not help looking at the argument that Socrates gave to Crito, one of his disciples, when the latter visited him in jail.

Socrates had been sentenced to death by a court in Athens. The charge was that Socrates was corrupting the youth with his ideas. Accordingly, he was found guilty and sentenced to death. The sentence was to be carried out using hemlock poison.

His students and disciples hatched a plan to free Socrates from jail before the sentence could be carried out. After Crito delivers his message Socrates shows him that it would be wrong of him to escape regardless of the injustice he was suffering.

When Crito argues that people would certainly think it improper and ungrateful if he and others known to be followers of Socrates stood by and watched their teacher executed, Socrates uses the analogy of an athlete and his qualified coach to destroy Crito’s argument.

His view is that an athlete cannot be guided by what people on the terraces say, but only by the suggestions and criticism of that one man who is most qualified to train and advise him – the coach!

Crito cannot help but succumb to the characteristically faultless argument advanced by Socrates even though he feels disinclined to do so. In the end Crito agrees with Socrates that the escape has to be aborted.

Similarly, the teacher should be that one person that the pupil can always depend on for tutored guidance and whose advice is not only proper, useful and relevant, but also expert and professional.

We all know just how vociferously primary schoolchildren in particular, defend their teachers and will dismiss anything that in any way does not resemble what “Ma’am” said.

Today’s teachers appear not to appreciate this subtle but important point in relation to how pupils tend to view teachers and family.

At teachers’ college, I was taught the importance of keeping the social records of individual children in my classes and did so in practice after I entered “the field” as it was affectionately known.

These social records which also included such sociometric information such as who was an isolate and who was gregarious helped a teacher understand the pupils in terms of their family backgrounds, their learning styles or problems and so on.

As for methodology, that was strictly the teacher’s domain, and still is to a very large extent. The teacher is, in theory and in practice, well prepared and primed for the job and has a number of useful tools in his or her arsenal, something the besieged parent, guardian or grandparent at home does not have the luxury of.

According to Linda Dobson’s 2005 book, “The Learning Coach Approach”, a learning coach is someone “who inspires, encourages and guides their child’s learning experience to bring out the best in their ‘player.’”

Dobson asserts that by becoming learning coaches parents are able to encourage their children to grow and develop a love of learning and to never fall back. But, without the necessary help parents are always going to find the going tough. People can become successful learning coaches if they are helped to adopt some of the ideas espoused by Dobson.

Dobson’s formula (CIAL) is captured in her aphoristic sentence: Curiosity creates Interest, Interest increases Attention to the task at hand, and Attention gives rise to Learning. Curiosity, therefore, is a prerequisite for learning.

When interest is aroused, it leads to discovery, and when that happens learning is driven more by intrinsic than by extrinsic motivation. In other words, children direct their own learning with the minimal necessary guidance. They take the walk of lifelong learning, something only possible with independent learning habits.

Today’s perfunctory teachers must be reminded that parents are not their unpaid assistant teachers! They need to up their game by persuading parents, guardians and significant others at home to become learning coaches rather than make them, willy-nilly, their appendages.

Pedagogically, many of these teachers are near-bankrupt, lack diligence and have no conscience. Accordingly, they are ethically deficient. The world over no one looking to be rich becomes a teacher. Teachers at all levels generally earn enough to get buy, so remuneration should not be an issue here.

Just over a decade ago, I spent three weeks at a writers’ residence at Chateau de Lavigny in Switzerland with five other writers, including a professor from an American university who told me about spoilt rich kids with stables and horses on campus and all sorts of luxury cars, things he yearned for but could only dream about.

So let those who would be teachers do so as a vocation and let them also take heed of the ominous words from James in the New Testament when he says: “My brethren (we must suppose and sistren too), let not many of you become teachers, knowing that we shall receive a stricter judgment” (James 3:1-2).

We need a serious paradigm shift across the board, and especially in recruiting for teachers’ college. Those with mercenary tendencies must be rejected outright at the very beginning of the process, and practising non-performers must be weeded out promptly.

Denying them the annual bonus does not go far enough to remedy the situation. These misfits can resort to their multiple intelligences and gravitate somewhere else where they can be more useful.

In this regard I find a capital idea from a business associate of mine, Zwelibanzi Ndlovu, a transformation guru, quite illuminating.

His “ACE” stands for Activities one Consistently Excels in. I agree with him in toto, that there are higher dividends all round when we all do that which we most enjoy doing and also find easiest to do.

So if you do not enjoy teaching, find something else! This sounds radical I know, but then most worthwhile solutions are. Don’t make home a misery case for parents and children. A new working relationship between teachers and people at home is necessary and urgent.

Not every parent can do what teachers expect. Diagnosis, for example, in terms of multiple intelligences (Howard Gardner, 2009) and giftedness is a highly taxing exercise and pointers are, without doubt, necessary.

So teachers, the next time you send children home with instructions to be taught at home, think about the complexities I have raised, and whether or not you are the right person in the right place.

 David Mungoshi, an applied linguist, is also a qualified primary and secondary school teacher who has taught for many years in teacher education and at university. He is an award-winning writer and a published poet.